Social Media Success – from the road – The Monday October 12th roundup

Blogging from the road this week. On my way to Exact Target Connections ’09 for some direct marketing goodness. Of course, by the time you read this I’ll be at the partners summit. If you’re in the area, find me and say hi.

This week we’ve got the first SEO light (ok, absent) roundup in quite a while. Starting with measuring social media, preventing email unsubscribes, explaining Google Analytics and moving on to measuring the success of branding.

• We start the week with word from Google spammaster Matt Cutts, explaining how Google reads robots.txt files. Good for those who are trying to get their duplicate content, private content, and like issues under control.
• Next up Huo Mah (I know, I know…) and metrics for social media success (this is another Terry VanHornne post).

If you’re running an ecommerce store then you might wantto take a look at Honkiats

roundup of open sources ecommerce shopping carts

. We’re currently looking at Magento ourselves, seeing if its suitable for a client of ours.
• Sixrevisions explains six advanced JS techniquest you should know.

• We’re a little light on the analytics posts this week. Just emarketer on the decline of clickthrough as an advertising metric.

• To complement the open source shopping carts above, smashingmag has 15 common ecommerce usability mistakes and how to avoid them.
• After you follow the advice of the above, create a usable contact form, mmkay?
• Uxmatters this week took a look at the evolution of the arrow as a control symbol. Pretty neat read, actually.

• Mashable asks if Google needs Twitter. I thought we got over this issue already. Are people still concerned about how Google will handle realtime search?
• Rupert Murdock seems to think that Google is stealing content from him by providing links to his sites. At least, according to this story we’re stealin from newsweek he does.